Frequently asked questions
These are the questions procurement, agronomy and quality teams ask us before they start.Can't find yours? Book a call.
About Finches
What does Finches do?
Finches is sourcing intelligence for agricultural raw materials. It watches the regions and farms your raw materials come from and tells your team which origin needs a decision, with the evidence behind every alert.
It does this while there's still time to change the plan: buy earlier, sample differently or line up a second supplier.
Who is Finches for?
Finches is built for manufacturers in food and beverage, baby food, pharmaceuticals and herbal medicine, and cosmetics: companies whose products depend on agricultural raw materials. It watches every raw material and origin at once, so the broader your portfolio and the more origins you buy from, the more it does for you.
Inside those companies, procurement uses Finches to decide when and where to buy, agronomy to act while the crop is still growing, and quality to test where the risk is.
Is Finches live?
Yes. Enterprise food manufacturers use Finches today. Risk alerts have been live since September 2026, and our customers' agronomists record their farm visits in the Finches mobile app.
We keep building Finches together with our customers. New customers join through our Early Access Program and help decide what we build next.
How it works
How does Finches work?
Finches builds a picture of your supply base: the raw materials you buy, where they come from, your suppliers, specs and contracts. It also uses the data you already have: lab results, sourcing history from your ERP, harvest volumes and quality, and your agronomists' farm visits. It reads outside signals against that picture: weather, satellite, soil, agronomic research, pests and disease, market prices, trade rules and tariffs, regulation and local news.
When something changes, our agentic system works out which raw material, origin and supplier it affects and what that means for your decision. A frost in week 12, for example, means something different for spinach than for almonds.
Your team sees the result as an alert with its evidence. You can also browse your supply base by supplier, or ask a question in plain language and see where the answer comes from.
Which raw materials and regions does Finches cover?
Every agricultural raw material you buy, from any origin. Weather and satellite data cover the whole world. Local news is read in the language it's published in, so a pest report in Turkish reaches a hazelnut buyer in Germany. If coverage of an origin is thin, we extend it.
We don't buy directly from farms. Can we still use Finches?
Yes. Finches watches the regions your raw materials come from, whether you buy from farms directly or through traders and processors. Knowing the crop and where it's grown is enough for risk alerts on that origin.
Do we need people in the field?
No. Your team can use Finches entirely from the desk, with outside signals and the data you already have.
If you do have agronomists or field staff, they record each farm visit in the Finches mobile app by voice, photo and note, even offline. By the time they're back in the car, the visit is a structured report that procurement and quality can search. Growers don't have to enter anything.
How do we know we can trust an alert?
Every alert carries its evidence and its sources, so your team can check it before acting on it. Finches proposes, and your team decides: nothing leaves Finches unless a person on your side sends it.
How is Finches different from other risk tools?
Most risk tools tell you what's happening in a region. Finches works out what it means for the raw materials you buy: which origin, which supplier, which variety, and what to do about it.
Farm software is built for the people growing the crop, and Finches for the people buying it. It also keeps your agronomists' knowledge in the same place as weather, satellite and trade data.
Is Finches an AI product?
Yes. Our agentic system reads every signal against your crops, varieties and origins and recommends what to do. It draws on an agricultural model we built for this. The system knows, for example, that a warm, wet spell at flowering can push mycotoxins in durum wheat over your limit, long before a lab measures them.
Couldn't we build this ourselves with a general AI assistant?
You can set up a daily summary of weather and news. What a general assistant can't see is what makes an alert useful to you: your agronomists' field visits, your test results and your quality standards. None of that is public, so no AI model has it. Finches already knows how a field connects to the supplier and the raw material you buy, and it reads every signal against that, including news from your origins in their own languages. Your data stays yours and is never used to train models available to others.
Does Finches replace our lab?
No. Finches shows you where risk is building, so you can aim sampling at the fields that carry it and see lots drift before the lab confirms it. Releasing or blocking a lot against a limit stays with your lab and your quality team.
Can Finches predict yields?
We don't build yield prediction. Plenty of approaches to it exist already, and it isn't where a sourcing team gets its first value. Finches concentrates on the risks that decide whether you get the volume and quality you need, and flags them while you can still act.
Working with us
What do you need from us?
To start, a list of the raw materials you buy and where they come from. That's enough for risk alerts on those origins. Every addition makes the alerts more specific to your business: suppliers, specs and contracts, lab results, farm visits. You can add them as you go.
Does Finches connect to our systems?
It can, when you want it to. Finches doesn't need an integration to start. When you want Finches to read directly from systems such as SAP or your lab database, we set up the connectors together.
Is our data safe, and who owns it?
Your data stays yours, and it's never used to train a model anyone else can use. It's hosted in the EU under a data processing agreement. Everything else your IT and legal teams will ask about, from access rights to deletion, is on our trust page, where you can also request the full technical documentation.
How much does Finches cost?
Finches comes as an annual license, priced by how much your company spends on agricultural raw materials each year. It covers every raw material, supplier and origin you buy, and risk alerts are included. The mobile app is priced per user.
On top of that, you can add premium risk alerting with recommendations, connectors to your own systems, custom risk models for priority raw materials, and automated scorecards and reports. Contract length and support level shape the final price, and Early Access customers join on preferential terms. Book a call and we'll work out the number for your company.
How do we get started?
Book a call with Catharina. We look at the raw materials you buy and where they come from, and show you what Finches sees for them. If it's a fit, our first step together is agreeing on your goals: what you want to achieve, what Finches has to deliver for that, and how you'll track it in Finches.
New customers join through our Early Access Program. It has ten spots and comes with six months of personal support, and participants help decide what we build next.
The company
Who is behind Finches?
Finches has three founders. Catharina van Delden (CEO) founded innosabi out of TU Munich, built it into Europe's market leader for innovation management software and sold it in 2021. Dr. Stefanie Glenn (CTO) holds a PhD from Cambridge and built data and AI products at Google, Palantir and BMW. Alexandra Vázquez Bea (CFO and COO) was previously CFO/COO at Oetker Digital and the CFO responsible for the Veganz IPO.
Finches is a remote-first team of nine, with its registered office in Wörthsee near Munich.
How did Finches start?
It started with a drought. In 2021 and 2022, a drought hit Uruguay, where Catharina's family runs a farm, La Baguala. Families on neighboring farms lost their livelihoods, and growers had to make decisions with far too little information while buyers downstream still expected certainty.
What growers could see in their fields reached the companies buying their crops too late to change anything. Finches was built to close that gap.
Why is it called Finches?
Darwin's finches (yes, the birds) showed that survival depends on noticing change early and adapting faster than everyone else. We apply that to sourcing: catch the early signals in climate, crops and supply networks, and act on them before shortages, quality problems or price shocks hit.